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Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Movie Review: X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the first spin-off film
set in the Fox X-Men Universe that focuses on the signature Wolverine
character. Hugh Jackman returns for the titular role in this film that goes
back in time to tell the origin story for the Wolverine we all know and love.
The film was directed by Gavin Hood and stars Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston,
Lynn Collins, Taylor Kitsch, and Ryan Reynolds alongside Jackman.

Put
quite simply, this movie isn’t good. In fact, it’s very bad. I’ll start out
briefly with what I thought was good about the film. It is conceptually
effective and a good idea for a story. Jackman does the most with the weak
dialogue and story he is thrust into in the film. Ryan Reynolds is interesting
as Deadpool for just a moment (sufficient for him to get another crack at it
several years down the road). Finally, Taylor Kitsch was fairly engaging as Gambit,
all things considered. I am already reaching somewhat and would be going much
too far were I to dig in further and make up more positives in this film than
those already addressed.

The worst
thing about this film is how much wasted potential there was. It had a stellar
cast, an interesting area to discuss, and even some things in the film that
would have been cool if properly executed. Though Gambit was mostly well done,
Deadpool was entirely botched, Sabretooth was underwhelming (and a blatantly
inconsistent with the original X-Men films), and the new William Stryker
totally paled in comparison to the brilliant performance we got from Brian Cox
in X2: X-Men United.

On
top of those comparative issues, this film is incredibly poorly written and made.
Written by Skip Woods and David Benioff (the latter of which has greatly
redeemed himself through his award winning work on Game of Thrones), this film has awful dialogue and is just very
poorly stitched together internally and into the X-verse as a whole. Basically
nothing worked and I frequently found myself looking quizzically at the screen
asking “how did they think this was a good idea?”

Story
problems aside, as mentioned I think this film is poorly made as well. Hood
clearly didn’t know what he was going for or did not have adequate creative
control to do something interesting with this movie because it is the most stylistically
drab and unsuccessful X-Men film ever made. Additionally, none of these
incredibly talented actors really give a whole lot to it (outside of Jackman,
Reynolds, and Kitsch in their own ways). Further, the visual effects looked
terrible and the film went way over the top with them. After making three X-Men
films prior and having this simple and interesting concept to go for in this
film it is baffling how much they dropped the ball in this film. They went way
overboard with the effects and some (like Wolverine’s claws) looked worse than
they did when the first X-Men film came out 9 years earlier.

Finally,
I think the most tragic thing about this film is the gross misunderstanding it
had of the characters. It seemed like at every turn it took well known X-Men
characters that fans know and love and tragically failed to bring them to
screen. Whether it was the egregious changes with Deadpool or any number of
other side characters in the film I left it back in the day and on this most
recent re-watch feeling immensely disappointed that this film exists.

Overall,
this is a pretty terrible film. It fails on so many levels and is only
quasi-redeemable because of a couple individual performance efforts and an
interesting base concept. This is a film that really ought to be forgotten and
the X-Men timeline has seemingly tried to do that at every possible turn. I can’t
blame them for that choice honestly.

Ryan’s
Score: 2/10

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I saw that looking up the cast list for the film! I was surprised but also happy in a way that I have mostly liked every Deadpool moment Ryan Reynolds has had. I do feel bad for Adkins though for having such a bad sequence because he is talented in his own right.